October 29 2004

I received several e-mails and pings about
this
slashdot thread overnight.
I see a couple of people
have blogged
it as well. It's prompted
by a BusinessWeek
article about wikis, specifically about Socialtext.
First, I think wikis are a great tool. They are an easy way to share
information, and require very little user training, are easy for users
to engage in, and demand little IT overhead. I also have a lot of
respect for Socialtext. I didn't know a lot of the details behind
their organization until I read the BusinessWeek article. It's fascinating
that they are a true virtual organization, and that they are making great
use of their own technology. I hope they continue to have success
in the market, and have enjoyed getting to know their viewpoint through
CEO
Ross Mayfield's blogging (and
use of other tools like del.icio.us, flickr, and writing at Corante's
Many2Many).
Still, it seems like every few months, there's an article somewhere that
says that some new collaboration technology is going to kill Notes. Long-time
readers here know the score...it goes all the way back to Collabra Share,
Livelink, eRoom, Groove, everything Microsoft, etc. In most cases,
the competing technology is a point solution...it addresses one piece
of what Lotus Notes does. Thus, none has been that proverbial "Notes
killer". Just for fun, I googled a few expressions like "unlike
Lotus Notes", just to see how many of those competitors were out there.
Some of the hits were amusing, others showed how far Notes has come,
and a few showed that even
today, companies continue
to try to figure out how to work a little bit of Notes magic into their
own product lines.
In this case, the community has made the comparison of Notes "versus"
wikis irrelevant. Like so many other modern technologies, Notes (and
Domino) have provided a foundation and architecture for adopting the new
collaborative technology. We have blogs and RSS feeds being published
on Domino. We have RSS
newsreaders for Notes. And
yes, we have wikis
for Domino (such as BenPoole's
wiki).

Now, as for the
slashdot discussion. I
wasted a good 30 minutes reading the whole darn thing this morning. Aside
- I don't normally read slashdot discussions, because I find the navigation
so cumbersome. They also have evolved in such a way that the first
responses to a discussion thread tend to get the most responses...when
you get further down, the energy and furor starts to peter out. Anyway,
some interesting observations -- 1) I could have bet $50 that someone would
mention the "User interface hall of shame" entry on Notes...
but at least this time, someone else rightly pointed out that it was written
on Notes 4.6 and hasn't been updated in five years (in fact, the company
that originally created the UI hall of shame dot bombed! and the site that
still lives on is a mirror of the original). Also, unusual for a
slashdot discussion, there seem to be a fair number of people on side of
balance -- defending and advocating for Notes. But most point out
that the comparison, as I said above, is silly and irrelevant. Which
is good.
What's really funny to me is that somewhere else in the discussion, someone
says that "wikis are dead". LOL -- I guess there's one
in every crowd.